We Create Clarity a design agency based in Bedfordshire, were in touch to commission a city scape type drawing for their client Costa Coffee. Costa coffee had plans to refurbish one of their key coffee shop locations. The Costa coffee shop in the large shopping mall Westfield, White City London, would go under refurbishment, and were looking to commission a illustration which would feature on 2 of their large walls.

I was commissioned to illustrate 2 large wall illustrations at the Costa Coffee Shop. The first illustration a London cityscape illustration that combines drawings of iconic London architecture for example the London Eye and the Ritz, as well as drawings of Residential and shop fronted London buildings you would see on a normal London High Street. The most important key feature of the illustration was to show the first Costa Coffee shop location founded just of Southwark Bridge.

The second illustration commission focused on the Costa Coffee shop front, with illustrated people going about their daily routines and buying coffee. Within the composition of the illustration, the brief indicated to incorporate food elements to represent fresh food and coffee.

Each element of the illustration was drawn and then scanned to a very high resolution; this allowed me to work 1:1 scale. Working to this scale had its challenges one of which was the computer working very hard and slowing down.

I explained the client; working to scale would be the best option as it retains the quality of the hand drawn lines. I don’t like to vectorise my work, since this changes the look and feel of the work and the hand drawn quality of the lines are lost and the illustration looks a lot more digital.

One of the benefits of drawing the individual aspects of the illustration and scanning them separately and composing them into photoshop, gives you the flexibility to make changes to the illustration easier.

Seeing the illustration and the scale in real life was an amazing feeling. The illustrations looked great up on the walls of Costa Coffee, and suited the interior design.